Aussie dairy creates 1.3 tonne wheel of cheese

If you're going to show off, you might as well go big. That's what Aussie cheesemakers did when displaying their dairy dominance at the British Empire Exhibition, in Wembley 1924. This right here is the definition of "the big cheese". Thanks to Myles Sinnamon's very important research project for Queensland's John Oxley Library, we can tell you this whopper came from the Pittsworth Dairy Company, based in southeast Queensland. We're not sure of the exact type of cheese it was, but according to reports from The Pittsworth Sentinel it weighed in at just over 1.3 tonnes, had a diameter of about 167cm and stood at 76cm tall. It was estimated to be worth about $14,000 in today's market and required a whole day's supply of milk to create. That's a cheeky 3,445 gallons of milk, to be clear. To get it to the UK, the wheel was carted on a wagon pulled by a tractor to a train station and then travelled by rail to a Brisbane wharf before making the voyage by boat. The cheese was originally made in October 1923, but was shipped to England in February the next year after being kept in cold storage at the wharf. It was on display for a few months before being carved up and sold off. [The National Library of Australia]